Detection of SARS-CoV-2 using non-commercial RT-LAMP regents and raw samples.

Alekseenko A, Barrett D, Pareja-Sanchez Y, Howard R, Strandback E, Ampah-Korsah H, Rovšnik U, Zuniga-Veliz S, Klenov A, Malloo J, Ye S, Liu X, Reinius B, Elsässer S, Nyman T, Sandh G, Yin X, Pelechano V

Sci Rep 11 (1) 1820 [2021-01-21; online 2020-08-24]

RT-LAMP detection of SARS-CoV-2 has been shown as a valuable approach to scale up COVID-19 diagnostics and thus contribute to limiting the spread of the disease. Here we present the optimization of highly cost-effective in-house produced enzymes, and we benchmark their performance against commercial alternatives. We explore the compatibility between multiple DNA polymerases with high strand-displacement activity and thermostable reverse transcriptases required for RT-LAMP. We optimize reaction conditions and demonstrate their applicability using both synthetic RNA and clinical patient samples. Finally, we validated the optimized RT-LAMP assay for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in raw nasopharyngeal samples from 184 patients. We anticipate that optimized and affordable reagents for RT-LAMP will facilitate the expansion of SARS-CoV-2 testing globally, especially in sites and settings with limited economic resources.

Category: Other

Funder: KAW/SciLifeLab National COVID program

Funder: VR

Research Area: Diagnostics for virus

Research Area: Viral sequence evolution

Type: Journal article

PubMed 33469065

DOI 10.1038/s41598-020-80352-8

Crossref 10.1038/s41598-020-80352-8

Numeric raw data for the amplifcation curves
Ct values for clinical samples from GeneXpert and all the RT-LAMP trials


Publications 9.5.1-pretest